Whenever I hear Netflix binge, I hear “Stranger Things,” “Black Mirror,” “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Jessica Jones. What I never hear is “The Santa Clarita Diet.” The show just released season 2 this past month, but I still get puzzled looks whenever I bring the show up. It seems as if this show is Netflix’s best-kept secret.
The show stars Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant as Sheila and Joel Hammond, who are 40-somethings living in Santa Clarita, California with their teenage daughter Abby. The husband and wife are a realtor team who are in it for the long haul. The family lived a pretty demure life in their same old, boring suburban town. They were the type of workaholic couple who really didn’t have time for each other.
One day, Sheila goes through a sudden change after eating takeout clams. She projectile vomits black goo all over the house, coughs up a red ball, and literally drops dead. But not really, when she wakes up. The only difference is she has an unusually high sex drive and energy level. She wants to live life with so much more zest.
This all comes at a teeny tiny cost. She craves human flesh. In the show, you’ll see her snacking on raw meat or dismembered fingers. Nevertheless, Sheila loves her new life. In one of the promos for season two, she yells at the top of her lungs, “I want to shake shit up. Dream big. I don’t want to stop living just because I’m undead.”
That she does, but she and Joel do it in a hilariously murdersome way.
When their rival Gary won’t stop hitting on Sheila, she defends herself by (accidentally) killing him. Once she has a taste for real human flesh, she craves more and more. And so Joel and Sheila go from a team of realtors to a team of killers.
After this show, you’ll want a Joel of your own. He sticks by his wife, even when it means killing becomes their new hobby. He provides the comedic relief of the weirdest things like, “I had such a good day at the asylum,” or when making shelves, “I guess we could just get pine, the Toyota Camry of the Forest.” You’ll instantly want to become his best friend.
To be fair, Sheila and Joel only kill bad people, like cheaters, bad cops, sex traffickers, and Nazis.
When Sheila stops munching, they store the severed body parts in their freezer and she’ll thaw out a human liver in the microwave for dinner.
Now that Sheila is undead, the biggest problem, besides their kill room looking too much like a kill room, is that Sheila is getting more aggressive. During her blackout, she killed a Nazi and was found eating his heart in her new Range Rover.
There are even more missing people in Santa Clarita and Sheila’s not even to blame for them all. When it seems as if the undead are spreading, Joel and Sheila try to put an end to it all in season two.
What could possibly go wrong?
Catch up on season one and two of “The Santa Clarita Diet.” It’s filled with talking decapitated heads, missing fingers and lots and lots of blood.
You’ll have a murderously good time.
